STAGE REVIEW : A Luminous Dickinson in ‘The Magic Prison’

Theatre West has confronted a risky challenge--staging a new play about Emily Dickinson while setting 18 of her poems to original music. It’s a gossamer experience, pretty exotic material for general audiences but also one that admirably opens up the passionate interior of this great poet.

“The Magic Prison: Emily Dickinson in Words and Music” will necessarily be compared to Julie Harris’ monodrama, “The Belle of Amherst” (1976). Suffice it to report that this world premiere of “Magic Prison,” by William Wood, proves there is room for another look at this poet.

Actress Catherine MacNeal is a luminous Dickinson whose restless spirit in a rigid world is subtly capable of inviting love affairs (at least one, we hear, if not two). MacNeal’s portrait is indeed a troubled figure but burnished and joyous, too, not merely an eccentric holed up in her father’s house in 19th-Century Amherst.

Playwright (and co-composer) Wood has struck a tantalizing chord between the white-clad image of fragility that legend conveys and the talkative girl-next-door suggested by the “The Belle of Amherst.”

Unlike the solo-powered “Amherst,” “The Magic Prison” is a four-character drama with a rapturous bower of petals backdropping bed and parlor rooms in a lovely conception by set designer Don Llewellyn.

Director Deborah LaVine’s artful staging produces a wedding (cake) of form and content. It is language after all, Dickinson’s compact, intense images, that must fuel the drama, and in this context, the production is pristine.

In fact, Dickinson’s poetry is surprisingly workable in a dramatic context. The poems are short, the choices accessible. They animate and propel this 90-minute, intermissionless drama. You want theater of language? Here it is. More importantly, underscoring what an original she was, Dickinson spoke in the idiom of the 20th Century.

As for the music, co-written by musical director Glenn Mehrbach, and performed live off stage, it is meant to enrich the dissonances and assonances of the poetry. But, on the whole, this music seems a bit superfluous. Sometimes a note will muffle MacNeal’s bell-like diction. And when you miss a word in a Dickinson poem, forget it.

The material, a cross section of letters, poems, and narrative bridges, is presented like a memory play, framed by Dickinson’s death at 55 in 1886.

Two alter ego figures are fluidly performed by Jeanne Dougherty and Penelope Windust. They also double in other roles, which include Dickinson’s sister Vinnie and the poet’s sardonic, warm close friend, the novelist Helen Hunt Jackson (“Ramona”). But when the pair sing together, all you can hear is Dougherty. Windust needs to rev up her vocal register.

The fourth character is male, vocally and dramatically strong in the multiple role-playing of Bill Malone. His characters number Dickinson’s brother Austin, her literary friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Rev. Charles Wadsworth, well-known Springfield Republican newspaper editor Samuel Bowles (with whom Dickinson is particularly taken). Malone even becomes a young neighbor boy who plays outdoor games with Emily, “the perfect playmate,” when she is a child.

The show is enhanced by Cathy Crane’s period costumes and Lawrence Oberman’s flavorful lighting scheme. The production is a comparative curiosity--serene yet intense, an ellipsis of thought.

It tastes Dickinson’s life and finds, as the poet herself declares, that “it was a vast morsel.”

“Dear Friend,” we hear Dickinson later writing, “I’m sorry you came because you went away. . . . “

Performances are at 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, Fridays through Sundays, 8 p.m., runs indefinitely. Tickets: $11-$12.50. (213) 465-0070.